Save My Darlings

Ever hear people talk about "eliminating suffering"? Or maybe you imagine heaven is a place with "no pain" (cf. Revelation 21:4). This week I show you that pain is actually baked into the human experience, what that means for us, and how parts of heaven itself might be difficult. The question is not when the pain will stop. The question is what we are going to do with it, or, r...

If you've ever wondered what is at the center of human disorder, the answer we get from Genesis 3 and Romans 5 is pride. See what the first sin was, what God did about it, and how we can respond to re-receive edenic joy.

Part of the secret of enjoying God is, according to Psalm 37, "staying in your lane." Here we parse a bit of controversial Hebrew and show how "farming faithfulness" is essential to being able to "relax and enjoy watching God be God." A very small bit of Hebrew with some HUGE consequences for how we live!

Not sure if this is surprising or not, but one of the things I've learned from working with AI is how much our personal relationship with God, Scripture, and the church will impact our ability to use it safely. In this episode, I break down how AI can be amazingly helpful in our thinking and understanding and at the same time insanely dangerous if we are not deeply embedded in Bible, Grace, an...

My dad used to tell me, "Life's not fair" whenever I complained about not getting what I wanted. Well, God does something similar to Moses in Numbers 20 and it is a doozy. Is God not fair? Is life not fair? What can or should we expect from God? Find out how the Bible thinks about fairness and why.

When God reveals his nature and character in Exodus 34, he seems to indicate that he is a living contradiction, or at least what appears to be a contradiction to us. He says he's faithful and forgiving to 1,000 generations BUT he doesn't let the guilty off the hook and their children and grandchildren experience the results of their wrongdoing. Which is it? In this episode, we answer, &quo...

Are there people in your life you wish would come to faith? Do you have a hard time sharing the gospel? Israel's story in Exodus 18 shows the first "convert" to God's Way--and neither Moses nor any other Israelite has to lift a finger to make it happen! Maybe the Bible offers a new pattern for how to "get the word out" that you can try. It all begins with your "per...

In Numbers 11:33, older translations say that God hit the Israelites with a "great plague," but that's not what the Hebrew word makkah means. Find out what it does mean and why it matters (a whole bunch!) and how God's response to their complaining helps us make sense of Ecclesiastes AND the meaning of life!

In a very odd text in Exodus 4, we learn that "God tried to kill Moses." This is right after Moses has set out to do exactly what God wanted him to do. Why!?!? What is going on? There are some hints, and I think we can learn a ton from this section, but it isn't straightforward at all. So in this episode, God appears homicidal and possibly crazy, we learn how circumcision is a proof...

A lot of times the Bible leaves out all kinds of interesting details when it tells stories. Why? Part of what is going on involves how the Bible leaves space for us and our stories too. Listen to hear more!

It's sometimes difficult to understand what "trust," "believe," and "faith" mean in the Bible--especially the New Testament--because the Greek word behind all three is usually the same one: "pistis." And this matters a bunch because we need to know what is asked of us when we're told to "believe" or "have faith" or "trust.&qu...

The Bible contains a lot of pretty scary stuff from the spiritual world. We saw the Seraphim on Sunday and in the last podcast and, let's be honest, from our perspective these "Burning Ones" seem like monsters. So are we supposed to be scared of all that? The answer is a little bit Yes and a little bit No. Check it out!

Read the Bible enough and you will encounter some weird stuff. On Sunday, we ran into the "Seraphim," or "Burning Ones," who had six wings and set things on fire! What do we make of stuff like that? In this episode I give some explanation of what the Seraphim are and how we might interpret weird stuff like that when we come across it in the Bible.

In this episode we show what the Bible does and doesn't mean when it talks about a special movement of the Holy Spirit on individuals or groups. You may have heard Christians talking or singing about the Holy Spirit coming or filling a place. Well here I explain how to know what that means and how to tell is it's actually true!

Some Christians feel like they don't have much of a testimony. Maybe it's "boring" or "too simple" or they've just "always believed." Well I'm here to tell you that these kinds of stories aren't boring at all--in some ways, they might be the most important stories we've got. Listen here to find out why and then take the challenge to begin askin...

The Bible just sort of assumes that bad things happen to good people and doesn't seem terribly bothered by that fact--it certainly doesn't hamper anyone's faith in God! But in in today's world atheists and agnostics use the fact of "unnecessary evil" or suffering as a major reason to disbelieve in God or at least be unsure about God's good character. In this week'...

In this episode, I explain why we used the translation we did of Psalm 139 and explain the logic of the Psalm. In doing so, we see how important it is to take note of the weird stuff in the Bible. It's easy to gloss over things that don't fit our idea of who God is or what God is like, and doing so has led to missing out on the real depth, power, and tension in Psalm 139, and many other te...

This week's podcast ties up our Exiled series with a reflection on the role of remembering as people in Exile and how we can rekindle the joy of our greatest spiritual experiences in the here and now. Plus, a little bit of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation to help make sense of it all.

There are a lot of good interpretations of the Bible, but not every interpretation is good. A lot are out of bounds. But how? In this episode we go through three critical rules for interpretation: (1) Words can mean a lot but not anything, (2) The Bible tells a coherent story about God, the Universe, and us, and (3) The pieces of Scripture fit together to show us an all-loving, self-giving King. I...

Here's a question I get asked about different biblical passages: "What does this mean, this or that?" The assumption is that each text from the Bible has a correct interpretation and a whole bunch of incorrect ones. In this episode I demonstrate how the Bible might have multiple--even endless good interpretations. That doesn't mean anything goes, but that's for next week! See...

This might seem weird, but sometimes asking God to destroy someone or some group is a *good* thing. In fact, Jesus, Peter, and Paul all do it! The key is to understand why. Listen to this episode to get a quick course on what to do and what not to do and why.

In this episode we begin to understand humor in the Bible. Because there's actually a lot of it, we just don't usually get it because we have such a different culture. But the humor is there. And if you start to get it, you might find yourself laughing!

How do you know if you've interpreted the Bible rightly or well? Good question. We look at point #1 today, by way of 2 Timothy, Hebrews, and St. Augustine. The answer might surprise you because it has nothing to do with how good you are at reading!

On Sunday we talked about drawing lines that make us visibly different from the culture. One of the things we talked about but couldn't spend a lot of time on was the importance of choosing lines that are hard, unappealing, maybe even impossible for us. But why? Well, I think it comes straight from the text so take a listen!

Last week we talked about reading the Bible as if God is the main character of all the stories, poems, letters, histories, etc. in order to grasp his nature and character. Well what do we do when reading that way makes God look like a bloodthirsty tyrant? Are we wrong? How do we know? In this episode we use the analogy of the plot twist in mystery novels to explain how it can be that the God who o...